


A Feeling You Can't Get Back

by ossseous (ozean)



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Insomnia, Introspection, Lucy-centric - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14300562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozean/pseuds/ossseous
Summary: Lucy isn't taking her imprisonment under her mother as well as she would like the others to believe.





	A Feeling You Can't Get Back

She finds that there is only a little bit of light coming in. Just the faint remnants of moonlight filtering through their dirty, smudged, shoddy windows. It’s a line of soft life cresting over the bed, breaking onto the floor into little puddles of the barely perceptible. Kind of like echoes of a set sun, the source long gone, the little left behind just clinging to life.

It’s just enough for her to see him, sleeping atop the blanket—perhaps too warm in the sweats he wears for him to be anywhere near comfortable sleeping under it. The sight alone makes it hard for her not to chuckle. To see him like that, curled on his side on the little cot, turned to the wall, a discarded book at his back, legs too long and crooked at the knee just to keep his feet from hanging off the cot altogether.

It’s wholly different from her usual view of him. Even in handcuff he had an undertow of menace at his discretion, cinched up tight and ready to spring loose whenever he needed it to. But just there, Flynn is almost defenseless and it wages a war against everything she knows about him.

And it’s far from the first time she’s gone in there and witnessed the truth of his vulnerability. She doubts that it will be the last either.

Lucy can’t help but find it to be a lonely kind of existence—a room with nothing in it. And his room is little more than that. Nothing. Just a little cot and some linens. There is, however, a little stack of books set under a table lamp, neatly situated and stacked biggest to smallest. She wonders where he pilfered them from. Did Agent Christopher fill requests?

But beyond those vestiges of a life, it’s just—bare. It could be any other room. And it sinks something inside of her to acknowledge that it is not unlike her own side of her little shared room. Clean, almost untouched. She thinks of Jiya, the clutter of her existence spilling out of every nook and cranny. The mess of it all became somewhat of a comfort for Lucy in their short time as roommate. Like the little knickknacks of Jiya’s life could make their own little noise, just loud enough to quiet her own thoughts she wished so desperately to stamp down.

Even they couldn’t hold up to the real deal—another person close enough, the little noises they make just by living. The little swallows, the quiet sighs, the mumbles of unfinished thoughts. Popping knuckles. Bouncing knees. Jiya was enough in that way. A constant source of living noise, vibrating at her own frequency.

But Jiya’s been gone for so many nights now. In long enough to change clothes in the mornings and evenings before going off. Either with Rufus or to glue her eyes to a computer screen. Lucy doesn’t really ask which it is. She hasn’t earned that curiosity with Jiya, and knows it’s none of her business.

She thinks that perhaps part of her leaving is actually Lucy’s fault. She suspects she isn’t the best of roommates, especially not since she’s gotten back. Maybe before her mother took her they could have been the best of roommates. They would have stayed up chatting, watching things on their tablets, sharing snacks and dumb college stories. Lucy would regal Jiya with the intricacies of the birth control movement and in turn, maybe Jiya would tell Lucy all about her honor’s thesis on Ada Lovelace she did as an undergrad.

It has to be her fault because Lucy sees how hard Jiya tries to engage her. Over and over. She sees it in the halter conversation states that get whisked away on the dead air between them. All Lucy can do is wrack her brain for some kind of reply, any kind of reply.

But she comes up short. She can’t even meet Jiya in the middle.

So she’s gotten good at not making a single sound, not in the hallway leading down to his lone room, a bit away from the rest of theirs. For safety. She doesn’t make a sound when she gently nudges the door open. She even turns the hand enough that the click is muffled as she pushes it back shut behind her. Though she has come to suspect that it doesn’t really matter in the long run. She could probably stub her toe or slam the door or switch on the lights or even outright call his name, and Flynn would just keep on pretending to be asleep.

So she keeps on pretending to think he’s asleep. And it works for them. That’s what matters.

And really, she doesn’t quite know how much of it all she imagines when she ends up in there, how much is a blurry half-dream. After she’s delicately placed the book back with its companions and slipped into the barely existent space he’s not left her, the threat of sleep comes on fast. It settles in her so much more quickly there than it ever does back in her own cot where she can stare into the black nothingness of night and hope and pray that she can find something in there she can understand.

She knows it might be a bad idea. She does. Knows that he could use every single time she has snuck in there against her in the future during whatever argument they have next. He’d pull it out of his arsenal of truths about Lucy—those pesky ones she doesn’t want to face. She can almost hear his words then, see the look in his eyes as they come tumbling out from between his teeth, _you can’t even handle sleeping alone._

But then again, she thinks it might not be an entirely bad idea.

Because of all the little things she maybe imagines and maybe doesn’t imagine.

Like the way the coiled stiffness of his shoulders seems to only unspool as she settles in behind him. Or the way his breaths smooth out into deep pulls as she carefully tucks in just behind him. Arms in tangles and sandwiched between her stomach and his back. Or later, when she’s half asleep and she finally presses along the length of his back, how he shifts just the slights bit back to meet her.

And as she finally, _finally_ drifts off to sleep, she wonders if he’s the same. If perhaps he can’t truly sleep alone either.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://ossseous.tumblr.com) if you wanna yell at me about these two. 
> 
> Also yikes sorry this isn't betaed. I do hope to continue on with this after the semester ends, especially since I'll have a week off from work in May, but I think this stands pretty well on it's own as well.


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